Thursday

A Little Personal

So like OMG I have been SWAMPED with e-mail from fans asking me questions about this and that. Starting today I will to answer one a week, with the promise that I'll get to ALL of them in due time. This weeks question comes from Jenny in "LOST":

Q- YO Michael, I think you're fucking the shit. What is your headlining photo all about? Jenni, LOST

A- Well Jenny, thank you for the dibs. That perched up on top of my page is a photo of my desk in this crap London apartment I once lived in. Showcased are important things pertaining to my life in London. 1) Vice. This was always free from my hot hipster barber at Cuts. While I allowed myself to afford 40 pound haircuts for the first time in my life, my magazine budget was limited to free copies of Vice.

2) Lucky Strikes. Kind of the ugly stepsister of cigarettes here in the States, Lucky Strike is more than acceptable in the UK. The packs open in two, like a book, which comes in handy for storing money when one's wallet is stolen on vacay in Milan.

3) Orange Nido card. This was the key to my house that I lost in a biweekly basis. Mine was particularly loseable, as a shortage of ink in the card-printing machine caused my skin tone to perfectly match the rest of the card.

4) Vintage fake Gucci wallet circa 1981. (Not to be confused with a fake vintage Gucci wallet circa 1981). A few years ago, when I made dangerous choices and lived a more elaborate life, I stole a beautiful kitschy fake Gucci clutch from a midtown fleamarket. Not only was it black, retro and questionably faux, it was the Babushka doll of bags. It opened to reveal several removable pieces of decreasing scale. I wore this clutch with abandoned caution, until I was the victim of a minor hate-crime at an East Village McDonalds in 2006. Long story short, some wigger threw a fountain drink at my head and told me something I already knew. So I ditched the clutch and ''gifted'' it to my sister but kept the inside wallet, which during my London-life, held all of my British pounds. In that half a year, I don't think the total sum of its contents ever exceeded 5 pounds (US $10).

5) Shit phone. Pay-as-you-go phones are insanely popular in Europe, so I figured that was the way to go. Luckily, my friend Pat had just returned from some time in London and passed his old phone on to me. On that first day's shuttle from Heathrow to my new apartment (imagine an excruciating bus full of NYU juniors generally behaving as overeager, bright-eyed, overly-caffeinated, BFF-making freshman), I opened the phone and read Pat's Inbox and Outbox, front to back, side to side. Imagine my chagrin to find a slew of increasingly dirty texts from "Jack". Now Pat is not gay, but as he is my best friend, and we have often been able to engage fruitfully in MY ideas of fun, I have always kept an open mind. The sudden discovery of these 'sexts' confirmed my suspicions and now put me at the center of one of my major life crisisses. A dirty, dirty secret. A few days later, after having blabbed to a select few ears, it dawned on me that "Jack" was lazy phonebook-entry for "Jaqueline" (whom I knew of) and so life went back to normal. On a side note, my secret-holding ability has improved dramatically.

6) Finally, my Macbook. Brand new, out of the box, this baby was my best friend and sexual partner. It kept my nocturnal (and midafternoon) life spicy, greeted me after a hard day when my clinically depressed roommate would not, helped me with homework solutions (JEZEBEL!), played "Creep" by TLC whenever I asked it to and sometimes distracted me from enjoying London with it's infinite ways to make me miss New York.

See how fun this can be? Send me questions, I'm sick of making up my own and want more interactive shit to think/write about. In the meantime...